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Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible Department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the Journey Bible Department family. Welcome to day 276. I'm super excited. We are crossing over from book two of the Psalms into book three of the Psalms. If you don't know, Psalms is divided into five individual books. Because these Psalms or these songs of praise and prayer are supposed to be creating a Torah for the people of God everywhere they go. The presence of God is not supposed to only be experienced in the a temple, but the presence of God can be experienced anywhere where you create an altar unto the Lord. So that's what Psalms is designed to do. And so now we are getting into book three. So today we are looking at Psalms 73, 74, and 75. Hey, if you've done the reading, everything I'm going to say is going to make perfect sense. I'm going to give you context clues, and I'm going to give you as many nerdy nuggets as I can fit into this episode. I got a lot today. And we're always gonna leave with a timeless truth so that you can apply the word of God to your daily life. So for anyone who has not done the reading, this is a great place to stop the video, pause the audio, and go get the reading done. Okay, Psalm 73, 74, and 75 is what we are tackling today. For everyone that's done the reading, let's dive in. All right, book three. Okay, everybody say book three. Book three. Book three of the Psalms is actually gonna include 17 Psalms total. This is Psalm 73 all the way to Psalm 89. All right? You'll probably immediately notice that the five books that encapsulate the five books of the Psalms are not evenly split. Right? Like book one is massive. Right? Book three, obviously small. One of the things that you're probably going to notice immediately as soon as you pick up your Bible and look at Psalm 73 is that we're going to get a Psalm of Asaph. A Psalm of Asaph. Now, we've had a psalm by my brother Asaph in the past. I believe that it was Psalm 50. Somebody can fact check me. Let me know in the comments if that is right. I think it was Psalm 50, but I'm not a hundred percent I guess I could check it. I could fact check check myself. Let's go, let's go, let's go. Let's see if I can find Psalm 50 quickly. That's Psalm 44. Psalm 50. Yeah. Psalm 50. A Psalm of Asaph. All right, so Asaph's back. Asaph Rocky, not his blade. Okay, my man. Asaph's back. All right? And so let me give you context, because all three of the psalms that we're going to look at today are written by Asaph, okay? So if you've got your Bible, or if you've got maybe Bible software like I do, okay, you can go to First Chronicles, First Chronicles, Chapter 16, Verse 5, and 2 Chronicles, Chapter 5, Verse 12. Okay? I want you to remember these. These. I'm gonna give it to you as alliteration so you can remember it, okay? Asaph the architect. Okay. Asaph the architect. So David, King David is going to reimagine what temple worship is gonna look like. Before King David, there is no singing or instruments or musicians. That's not a part of worship. Worship was offering your animal sacrifice. It was serving in the temple, but it did not include singing. So this is why David is a man after God's own heart. He's like, man, we should really sing to God. Like, nobody before David was thinking to themselves, God likes music, all right? But David is like, man worship isn't just practical. It's not just taking care of the guilt or getting forgiveness from God or sacrificing an animal to God. But man, singing has a way of connecting us emotionally to God. And David begins to incorporate singing. Okay, so we see this in First Chronicles, chapter 16. Okay, First Chronicles, chapter 16, verse 5. I'm actually going to start reading. In verse 4, King David appointed some of the Levites to minister before the ark of the Lord. To extol. It's a good word. Thank and praise the Lord, the God of Israel. Asaph was the chief. Okay, so Asaph is important. And next to him in rank were Zechariah, then Jaziel, and then a bunch of other names that we don't really need to talk about, but they were to play the liars in harps. Asaph was to sound the cymbals, and Benaiah and Jahaziel the priest were to blow the trumpets regularly before the ark of the covenant of God. So David is going to institute these people to what, extol, thank and praise the Lord with singing and with instruments. Okay, so Asaph is literally a part of the foundation of Architecting this new way of. Of worshiping Yahweh. So Asaph the architect, you can also read about this in 2 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles, chapter 5, verse 12, it says this. All the Levites who were musicians, Asaph, Heman, Jedathan, and their sons and relatives stood on the east side of the altar dressed in fine linen and playing cymbals, harps, and lyres. They were accompanied by 120 priests, sounding trumpets. Okay, so this. Is this a choir? This is a lot of people. All right. The trumpeters and musicians joined in unison to give praise and thanks to the Lord. Accompanied by trumpets, cymbals, and other instruments, the singers raised their voices in praise to the Lord and sang, he is good. His love endures forever. Then. Oh, that's good. Then the temple of the Lord was filled with the cloud. Okay, what's the cloud? The glory cloud of Yahweh. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the temple of God. Okay. The singing and the musicians and the thanks and the praise that was offered to God prompts the cloud of glory to fall so that the priest cannot even perform the service. And by service, that means offering up animal sacrifices to the Lord. And so we begin to see in two Chronicles that this isn't just descriptive, this is prescriptive. That there's something about singing, there's something about playing music that connects our hearts to God and that God responds to it. God's about it like God likes it. Okay, so David isn't just some rogue crazy person who's trying to implement a form of worship that God's not about. God likes this. And God responds to this with his glory cloud resting. One of the ways that I communicate this on. On stage a lot is that we think about worship as inhale and exhale, right? That when we worship the Lord, it's like incense rising up to God. And we want God to breathe in our praise, to breathe in our worship. And anytime God breathes in, that means he's going to breathe out. And when God breathes out his cloud, his wind, his breath begins to fill our sanctuaries, begins to fill the rooms that we're in. And the presence of God falls as a response to us, lifting up praise and lifting up adoration and lifting up worship to God. So I want you to think when. When you are in praise and worship, if you're tired, if you're weary, if you're. If you're. If you're burnt out, if you're anxious and you need the breath of God, then how about you offer incense to the Lord so that he breathes in praise and then breathes out his presence into your life and into the sanctuary. So often that's counterintuitive. We think to ourselves, man, I'm drained. I just need God. Well, in being drained, what you need is to worship the Lord so that you can begin to get renewal and refreshing from God. Family, the wait is over. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, is out now and available everywhere. Books are sold. Literally. Today I walked into a Barnes and Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a Books A Million or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of Scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is going to be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. All right, so here's the context. The descendants of Asaph are going to be the ones who collect the psalms that we're looking at today. And most of the psalms for book three, the descendants of Asaph. Why do we know that the descendants of Asaph are the ones collecting Asaph's Psalms? Well, Ezra, chapter 2, verse 41, actually tells us that that's exactly what the descendants of Asaph did. And it's going to tell us when. And so the context for these psalms, not in their writing, but in their assembling, is going to be when the exiles from Babylon return to Jerusalem and start rebuilding Jerusalem. So the context for these psalms is return and rebuilding. Return, return and rebuilding. I could preach and teach on this right here, that hundreds of years after Asaph has lived, his descendants are still part of the worship, part of the fabric of the worship. Talk about a legacy. That you lived such a life of worship and praise that your descendants are still musicians. So this is what it says in Ezra 2:41. Remember, Ezra is tasked with the job of helping to rebuild the temple as Nehemiah is rebuilding the wall. Here we get Ezra 2:41. The musicians. The descendants of Asaph are listed as people who are helping to rebuild Jerusalem in the wake of the return from from exile. So I want you to just know that's the context, okay? That's context for who Asaph is contact context for his descendants. So these psalms are being assembled in a time where the people are happy that they're back in the land. But it's a little bittersweet because although they're back in the land, the land has been ruined, ransacked, ravaged, okay, by the Babylonians and by other raiding groups that have continued to come into Jerusalem and tear it to pieces. So these psalms come at a pivotal point in Israel's history. Okay? That's context. Let me try to give you as many nerdy nuggets as I can. Okay? First of all, Psalm 73 is a wisdom psalm. You can tell as soon as you start reading Psalm 73. It sounds a lot like questions that are being asked in the book of job. So Psalm 73, Asaph is gonna confess, okay? For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. Like man. Why do the wicked Prosper? Verse 13. Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence. I don't know if you've ever felt that way, like man. It's not even worth it to live righteously because there are people living ratchet who are winning at life. And so Asaph is being honest. He's like, wait a second, man. The arrogant and the wicked, they're prospering. So it's in vain that I've kept the commands of God and kept my heart pure. And I'll say two things to kind of connect that to modern day life. Actually, one of is from my wife. I remember when we got married, my wife was a virgin. And I remember her saying, like, it was kind of hard to stay a virgin because she just felt like there were all these girls who weren't honoring God with their physical bodies. And it was almost like they were getting rewarded by getting married and being in these awesome relationships. And again, my wife almost began to take on this idea. It's in vain that I've kept my heart pure and have washed my hands in innocence like man. There's people out here who are not sacrificing to the Lord to the level that I'm sacrificing to God. And they seem fine. Okay? And so this is a wisdom psalm because Asaph is asking and presenting God with the same kind of questions that Solomon and Job and Ecclesiastes and the wisdom literature of the Bible is presenting to God. Why is it that bad things happen to Good people and good things happen to bad people. So age old question. And what we are gonna get is God's not gonna answer that question. He's not gonna answer it in Job, and he definitely is not gonna answer it here in Psalm 73. And I wanna begin to teach you this idea. You can find this in verse 23, you can find this in verse 25, and you can find this in verse 28. Okay? Chapter 73, Psalm 73. This is kind of where the psalm begins to shift. It says this. When I tried to understand all this, okay, so this isn't a psalm of praise, it's a psalm of wisdom. He's trying to understand something. When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply. Like, what benefit is there to being a Christian or to being saved or to living righteously? Till I entered the sanctuary of God. Then I understood their final destiny. Okay, and then I entered the sanctuary of God. And drawing near to God, began not to bring answers, but began to help me to experience and encounter and appreciate God's presence. So I want to give you this framework. The thing that we are now gonna see through Psalm 73 is that answers are not what humans need. The presence of God is what we need. And so the psalm, the psalmist is going to begin to realize that. I thought I wanted answers for these questions, but really God's presence is more important than answers. Okay, so I want to read verse 23 to you. Verse 23. Yet I am always with you. You hear that I am with you and you hold me by my right hand. Psalm 25, I mean, verse 25, sorry. Psalm 73, verse 25 says this. Whom have I in heaven but you, and earth has nothing I desire besides you? You see that, that the psalmist is beginning to realize I don't really need answers to all these questions. What I really need is intimacy, is closeness, is proximity to Yahweh. Verse 28 says this. But as for me, it is good to be near God. The real conclusion of Psalm 73 is not answers to the questions. Is it beneficial for me to maintain righteousness? No. What's actually the thing that we need more than answers is the presence of God. Because once we experience God's presence, we begin to realize man, his presence is better than everything. And so the lifestyle that I've chosen to live is actually giving me the best gift that I could ever get, which isn't answers or clarity, but it's his presence. And I just wanna leave you with that presence over answers. His presence is greater than answers. And sometimes we desire answers more than we desire his presence. And you know that you've gotten a spiritual maturity when, like the psalmist here, like Asaph, you begin to appreciate his presence more than you are demanding answers from Him. Not that we never stop desiring clarity, but at some point you have to realize the chief thing that I need is God's presence. And if I have his presence, I can do without answers. But if I have answers, I can't do without his presence. I'd rather have presence than answers any day of the week. All right, let me give you some nerdy nuggets really, really quick for Psalm 74 and 75. OK, Psalm 74 is a corporate lament of the fall of Jerusalem. How do we know that? Well, it says it right here in verse 7. They burned your sanctuary to the ground. They defiled the dwelling place of your name. So obviously we're compiling these psalms post Destruction of Jerusalem. And these psalms are intended to help the returnees from exile have inspiration to rebuild Jerusalem. Okay, so verse 7 gives us context and helps us to understand why the context of the descendants of Asaph beginning to compile these psalms is even important. Okay, second nerdy nugget from Psalm 74 is that Psalm 74 is a chiasm. So verses 1 through 11 of Psalm 74 are all about corporate suffering. Verses 18 or 23 are all about corporate suffering. So the end and the beginning all about corporate suffering. Again, Psalm 1:11. It's not Psalm 1:11. Why do I keep doing that today? Verses 1 through 11 of Psalm 74 are all about corporate suffering. Verses 18 to 23 all about corporate, corporate suffering. So we begin and end with corporate suffering. And you know how chiasms work. The good stuff's in the middle. In the middle, we are going to have verses 12 to 17, and it's all about individual hope. But the author is going to talk about hope in a way that many of us on this podcast should be familiar with, because it's going to. The author is going to talk about the order that God established when he was creating the cosmos. Remember, if you think about Genesis chapter one like a Westerner, you're going to think about Genesis chapter one as God making something out of nothing. But if you think about Genesis 1 like a good Eastern Hebraic ancient person in Genesis chapter one is all about God bringing order to the chaos of the cosmos. So creating and ordering comes synonymous ideas, not simultaneous synonymous. So let me read verses 12 to 17 for you. But God is my King from Long ago, he brings salvation on the earth. Okay, how does God bring salvation? It was you who split open the sea. By your power, you broke the heads of the monster in the waters. What monster? That's right. The dragon. And that dragon is going to get named in verse 14. It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan. By the way, if you want to know about my last book, it's called Crushing Chaos. It's because of this verse that Yahweh crushes the head of Leviathan. Leviathan is a symbol of chaos and gave it to the and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert. It was you who opened up the springs and streams and dried up the ever flowing rivers. The day is yours and yours also the night. You established the sun and the moon. It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth. So what God does in the beginning is he does not eradicate all chaos. He gives chaos boundaries, okay? Boundaries of the earth and made summer and winter. So what we have in verses 12 to 17 is a little creation poem. And what we begin to realize is that the words salvation, creation and ordering are all used synonymously. How does God create? By bringing order. And how does he bring salvation? By bringing order. And what is he ordering? The chaos. What is he creating? He's creating order. And what is he saving us from? Chaos. Why is he saving us from chaos? Because chaos kills. Okay, you begin to realize, oh, this is a very, very, very eastern way to think about the cosmos in the world. This is an eastern worldview. All right? Last nerdy nugget. And it's going to come from Psalm 75. Okay? Our last Psalm for the day. Psalm 75 is a hymn of corporate praise. Okay, we've got a hymn of corporate praise now also. Let me back up for a second. Why is there a section while we are lamenting the fall of Jerusalem? Why does Asaph include a creation poem where God is creating order, where there's chaos? Well, because nothing's more chaotic than the temple being burned to the ground, then your city being burned to the ground, then you being driven off into exile into Babylon. Okay? The people have experienced insane chaos. And so Asaph is reminding the people the same way that God brought order, salvation, and that God brought his power to the earth by ordering the chaos. That same God is the God that we put our hope in. And yes, Jerusalem being burned to the ground and the temple being broken and torn down is a chaotic experience. But the same God who presided over the ordering of the cosmos in Genesis chapter one, is the same God who can bring orders to our lives again. Okay? Our lives are not so chaotic that God can't fix them, because the pinnacle of chaos was actually not the destruction of Jerusalem. The pinnacle of chaos was the. Was leviathan needing to be conquered? Was the seas and the deep needing to be ordered in Genesis chapter one. All right, Psalm 75, we've got a hymn of praise. All right? Now, Psalm 74 is a lament that the Babylonians have come and ransacked Jerusalem. So what's going to happen in chapter 75 or Psalm 75? We are going to get an entire hymn of how God is going to overthrow the nations. All right? And so this is a hymn that's really centered around God's wrath. Okay? This hymn of corporate praise, it's going to say this in verse 7, but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another. Okay? So it's gonna say this. In the hand of the Lord, there's a cup. Okay? This is Psalm 75, verse 8. In the hand of the Lord is a cup full of foaming wine mixed with spices. He pours it out, and all the wicked of the earth drink it down to its very dregs. Okay? So God is forcing the nations to. To drink his cup of wrath. Now, the context for what we find in Psalm 75 is actually found in Isaiah chapter 63, where the nations are grapes, and God steps on the nations to thresh those grapes to get wine. And then Jeremiah is going to pick up on this in that once God has trampled the nations to get wine, that wine is going to get emptied into God's cup of wrath, and then he's going to pour that wrath out. And so this idea is pretty graphic, okay? It's saying that if you connect these two images, God treads nations in a wine press and then makes other nations drink the resulting wine. This is meant to show both God's wrath against those who have harmed his people, Israel, but also his vast sovereignty over the nations. This is going to lead us to our timeless truth today. Because obviously, wrath is not an element of God's character that we can ignore in the Old Testament. So the cup of wrath is an image that now gets brought into the New Testament. This isn't just important for Psalm 75 or Isaiah 62 or Jeremiah 25:15. This is important for Jesus, because what does Jesus acknowledge? Let. In the garden of Gethsemane, where grapes are harvested and threshed. Okay, an olive press. Sorry, not grapes, but olives are Crushed. He realizes that he's about to get crushed, but he is in an olive press, but uses a grape metaphor, a wine metaphor for the Lord, and he says, let this cup pass from me. And so although the nations are threshed into wine in Isaiah, and then they are forced to drink it in Jeremiah, and we see the culmination of that in the Psalms. Jesus drinks the cup of wrath, and he says to the Lord, this is not my will, but I want your will to be done. Can I tell you the good news of the Gospel is that the wrath of God has been satisfied and Jesus has been treated with the wrath that you and I deserve so that we could be treated like perfect sons and daughters of God. We get to be treated like Jesus because Jesus was treated like us. That is a timeless truth. You may be thinking to yourself, man, the Old Testament is so full of God's wrath. Like, that's a massive theme. Where'd all the wrath go? It got poured out on the son of God, named Jesus. The cross is a picture not just of the grace and forgiveness and mercy of God, but also the justice of God, because the wrath that you and I deserved got poured out on the person of Jesus. And yes, the cross was brutal. The word excruciating actually comes from the word crucifixion. So when we say I'm in excruciating pain, that word was designed to communicate. This is the level of pain that is experienced on the cross. During a crucifixion, Jesus beard was pulled out of his face. He was brutally beaten. And the image that we're supposed to see is that on the cross, we get forgiveness, we get grace, we get mercy. Why? Because the wrath, the cup of God's wine wrath, got poured out on Jesus like a drink offering. And that is a timeless truth. You don't have to be worried or superstitious that God's out to get you or that you have to pay the penalty of your sin. If you surrender your life to the lordship of Jesus, he will drink the cup of God's wrath for you so that you don't have to. And that's not just true for David or Isaiah or Jeremiah. That is true forever. That's a timeless truth. All right, tomorrow we're gonna be in Psalm 76, 78. It'll be day 277 here on the Bible department podcast. I can't wait to see you. I'll be right here. Same time, same place. If you're on a streak, I'm insanely proud of you if you're not on the streak. Come on, get it together. I love you guys. I'm so proud of you. I'll see you right here tomorrow. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department Podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at thebibledepartment.com and on Instagram hebible department. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.